Scenario: Here we are again – crunch time. I have a request that is Jalapeno hot, and it requires ~100 new datastores, ~1000 virtual disks, and for some unknown reason a RDM or two sprinkled in. At the end of the day this is really no problem at all for two reasons: PowerCLI is an extremely viable product that allows us to automate pretty much whatever task we want to […]

Scenario: I was in the process of building a CMDB, and I needed to gather Dell Service Tag’s for my host machines. I did a little of internet searching and couldn’t really find anything specifically for Dell Blades. So to that effect here we all are today so: Game On! Note: My experience and code is in reference only to the Dell E1000 chassis and M-Blade series. So your mileage may vary […]

Scenario: So, you have a VMWare implementation with several hosts, VMs, datastores, etc…and you need to stay informed on what is happening in your environment. Things like how what’s the CPU usage on a particular host or disk free space on a datastore would be great to know but not something you always want to manually monitor. vCOPs is full of useful information and at times it could even become overwhelming […]

Scenario: Let’s say you’ve installed VMware vCenter Operations Manager, or as it’s affectionately known vCOPs, and you are suddenly inundated with email notifications! Trust me, we’ve been there :-(. If you are anything like us you have determined that you can’t quickly and efficiently weed out the real issues from the non issues in your inbox. By default vCOPs will send workload and anomaly alerts for metrics that breach dynamic thresholds, […]

Scenario: Maybe you are a medium size enterprise with 25, 50, or even 100 ESXi hosts and you are really not sure when the best time to upgrade your hosts. This is always a difficult question to answer based on bug fixes in not only ESXi code but also in VMware Tools code or even new feature sets. I have personally always found that you postpone until last minute or when absolutely […]

Scenario: With VMWorld 2014 on it’s way and another ESXi version release inevitably on the horizon what do you do when you have so many hosts that need to be upgraded but each host needs to be manually customized for your infrastructure prior to production use? The hosts could need VIBs for vShield, Cisco VEM, SCSI controller driver or maybe even Trend Micro Filter Drivers but each of these VIB installations could […]

Scenario: Have you ever been in that situation where you want to remediate a host for some sort of baseline and you can’t due to a pending reboot on all of your hosts, all hosts in a particular cluster, or just some hosts? This situation can be particularly frustrating especially if you run TrendMicro DeepSecurity in your environment. If this is the case for you then you know there are several […]